27 posts tagged with "git"

Is rebase better than merge?​

Neither rebase nor merge is inherently "better"; they are different tools used for different purposes in Git. The choice between them depends on your workflow, your team's preferences, and whether you want a clean, linear history or an accurate, chronological record of events (3).

Rebasing a local branch onto a remote branch is a common workflow for keeping your feature branch up-to-date with the main development branch (like main or master) and maintaining a clean, linear commit history.

The process involves a few key steps: fetching the latest changes, checking out your local branch, performing the rebase, handling conflicts, and then force-pushing your changes if the branch was already shared.

Does git rebase affect other branches?

Yes, git rebase can affect other branches, but only if you rebase a branch that other developers have already pulled and started working from. Rebasing a local, unshared branch has no impact on other branches in the repository.

The key to understanding this lies in how rebase works. It rewrites the commit history of a branch by moving its commits to a new base. When you run git rebase, you're essentially creating a new set of commits that replace the original ones.

Sometimes, you may want to retrieve a specific file from another branch in a Git repository without switching branches completely. This is particularly useful when you want to grab a specific version of a file for debugging, rollback, or review.

In this guide, we’ll walk through how to checkout a single file from another branch using Git. We’ll cover multiple scenarios with examples and best practices.

This error usually appears when your local branch has diverged from the remote, and Git is configured to disallow non-fast-forward merges.

Sometimes flake8 just won't shut up - and you're on a roll.

You want to bring your feature branch up to date with the latest main, but you don’t want messy merge commits.

The solution: rebase.

Rebase reapplies your local commits on top of the latest main from remote. It keeps your commit history clean, linear, and easy to read - especially when preparing a pull request.